Under the Empyrean Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

tights who flies around and fixes problems in a long-ago world. Smack dab in the middle of all of it is their home: an old white farmhouse with a slight leftward lean and a back porch with a roof that sags like a caved-in skull.
    The air, Cael notes, smells of cloying fragrance. Strong and floral.
    His father comes around from the back of the barn, a pump-sprayer in his hand with a dirty plastic tank hangingbelow it. He pulls the trigger on the nozzle in his hand, spritzing a mist across the little corn shoots that keep trying to come up through the driveway’s loose limestone gravel. He’s not wearing a mask, so Cael knows it’s not a chemical spray he’s using. Pop won’t take his rations of Queeny’s Quietdown—a fact that earns him a small measure of suspicion from everybody else in Boxelder.
    Then Pop sees Cael, and he hobbles over. The limp favors his left leg. The right one works okay—it’s the hip that’s the problem.
    “Cael,” he says, nodding. He sets down the tank with a slight groan and then pauses to push his round-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his hawk’s beak nose. His father’s not a big man. Cael has already outgrown him by a couple inches. Someone in town once said he looked “academic,” which is appropriate given the fact that Pop was a teacher once upon a time. “Not a bad-looking rat.”
    Cael nods. He hands the rat to Pop.
    “What’s in the bags?”
    Cael doesn’t want to say but knows he can’t just dodge the question. “Motorvator parts,” he lies. That seems to satisfy his father.
    The two of them stare at each other for a while. An uncomfortable silence. It wasn’t always this way, but lately a gulf has grown between them. Cael knows when it happened,but he doesn’t want to shine a light on that dark space.
    Finally, he says, “That stuff. What is it? It smells…” He wants to say, “Like someone ate a bunch of funeral flowers and crapped them all over the driveway.” Instead, he goes with “Strong.”
    “Lavender. Well, lavender oil. Natural herbicide. Doesn’t kill the weed so much as inhibit its growth. Or that’s what it’s supposed to do anyway. The fight against the weed continues, and we must remain ever vigilant.” He shakes a fist and offers a wink.
    Pop calls corn “the weed.”
    Part of Cael wants to rail against his father, tell him that “the weed” is how most people in this town make a living. Who is Pop to think he’s better than them for not accepting the corn when they don’t have a choice in the matter? It’s what the Empyrean demands. Heartlanders grow corn so it can be made into fuel, plastic, food additives, and drugs. They’re not even allowed to keep any for themselves or to eat it. Well, not that you’d want to—Hiram’s Golden Prolific has about as much nutritional content as a palmful of the driveway gravel underneath their feet. Plus, it’s all so goofed up with chemicals and twisted DNA, it’s not even safe to eat.
    Then again, what food is? You might end up like Carrie Marshall’s baby. Or Pop with his hip. Or… Cael’s minddrifts to his mother, but he can’t think about her now. Later, later, always later.
    Or worst, you could end up with the Blight. You get that, nobody will talk to you. They’ll run you out of town on a rail. Maybe even bash you over the head with a shovel and plant your ass in a pocket of dirt somewhere, see if you’ll grow.
    Pop’s eyes narrow. “Cael. Where’s the cat-maran?”
    Cael stalls, kicks a few stones. “Uhh. Took her to Lane’s. Got a crack in the hull. He’s got some mender’s paste. We put
Betty
up on blocks in his barn.”
    “You should have said something. We have a whole tin of mender’s paste here in the barn.”
    “Yeah. Well.” Cael changes the subject: “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
    Pop works at the local processing facility. Once a teacher of children, now just another cog in the Empyrean machine. Mayor Barnes gave him that job like he gives out all the